Person:
Pierola Castro, Martha Denisse
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
International economics,
Export development,
Firm-level analysis of trade
Degrees
External Links
Departments
Trade and Integration Team, Development Research Group, The World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Martha Denisse Pierola is an Economist in the Trade and International Integration Unit of the Development Research Group of the World Bank. She has published several papers on export growth and exporter dynamics and co-created the Exporter Dynamics Database –the first-ever global database on exporter growth and dynamics, based on firm-level export data. Her research studies the role of large exporters in driving trade patterns and export growth; and examines how exporter behavior varies with the stage of development. She was the leader of the team conducting the World Bank study on trade, competitiveness and regional integration in Zimbabwe. She has worked on issues related to regionalism, trade costs and trade and productivity. Before joining the World Bank, she worked as an economist for the Peruvian Government (INDECOPI) and also consulted for the private sector and other international organizations. She has a PhD in economics from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland and a Master of International Law and Economics from the World Trade Institute in Bern, Switzerland.
Publication Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
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Publication
Pathways to African Export Sustainability
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012-07-02)This report provides tentative leads toward such policy prescriptions, based on an overview of the empirical evidence. Chapter one sets the stage by putting Africa's export-survival performance into perspective and proposing a framework that will guide the interpretation of empirical evidence throughout the report. Chapter two covers country-level determinants of export sustainability at origin and destination, including the exporting country's business environment. Chapter three explores some of the firm-level evidence on what drives export sustainability, including uncertainty, incomplete contracts, learning, and networks. Finally, chapter four offers tentative policy implications. The main conclusions from this overview of the causes of Africa's low export sustainability should be taken with caution both because of the complexity of the issue and because of the very fragmentary evidence on which the overview is based. The author should be more cautious in drawing policy implications, as hasty policy prescriptions are the most common trap into which reports of this kind can fall. A first, solid conclusion is that the author needs substantial additional work on the nature and causes of low export survival rates in developing countries to determine the path to high export sustainability. -
Publication
Success and Failure of African Exporters
( 2011-05-01)Using a novel dataset with transactions level exports data from four African countries (Malawi, Mali, Senegal and Tanzania), this paper uncovers evidence of a high degree of experimentation at the extensive margin associated with low survival rates, consistent with high and middle income country evidence. Consequently, the authors focus on the questions of what determines success and survival beyond the first year and find that survival probability rises with the number of firms exporting the same product to the same destination from the same country, pointing towards the existence of cross-firm synergies. Accordingly the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that those synergies may be driven by information spillovers. More intuitively and consistently with multi-product firms models, the analysis also finds that firms more diversified in terms of products, but even more in terms of markets, are more likely to be successful and survive beyond the first year.